Abandoned Children
by misslucy21
Summary: He turned around and frowned at her. “You know, you shouldn’t talk bad about what you don’t know, ok?”


Abandoned Children

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Disclaimer: Not a'tall mine

Takes place during the episode "Slaughterhouse", so there's obviously some spoilers for that episode. It's probably not terribly canonical, but heck, they're not giving us a whole lot to go on for background other than the stuff, and I don't have a problem with messing with that sort of thing if it's not been explicitly mentioned onscreen.

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"What a mess," Calleigh sighed as she looked over his shoulder at his photographs. "She just gave up."  
  
He turned around and frowned at her. "You know, you shouldn't talk bad about what you don't know, ok?"  
  
"What are you talking about?" she asked, confused. "She gave up, Tim. She as good as walked out on them. You saw that place."  
  
"Yeah, I did. And I'm sayin', you don't know where she was coming from. You don't know if she wasn't doing the best she could. You know anything about post-partum depression? You ever seen anybody who wanted to take care of their baby but couldn't? What do you know about it that would let you judge her?" He was angry at her, at all of them. They had all said things that showed they had no idea what that woman had been going through.  
  
She shook her head. "No. No, I haven't."  
  
"Well, all right then," he said, twisting himself back around to his work.  
  
"How do you know?" she asked. He paused, unsure if he really wanted to answer. But he'd opened himself up to the question.  
  
He kept his eyes on his work as he answered, "My dad's...well, no, my mother, Marianne. She had me and she had trouble after. She snapped, really. I guess when I wasn't quite two months old, she walked into the hospital with me and told the nurse at the desk that they had to take me or she'd kill me. They thought it was because I was fussy or something, but it was really that she was so severely depressed that she was ready to kill both of us. They put her in the hospital for almost six months. When she got out, she and my dad got a divorce, because she couldn't...didn't want there to ever be a possibility she'd hurt me. She didn't want to take the chance. So she and my dad divorced, Dad had custody of me, and a friend of his that he'd known all his life moved in with us to help him with me. I grew up calling Melissa mom. She is my mom, really. Yeah, I've got half of Marianne's DNA, but she's not my mom. Melissa and Dad finally got married, when I was ten. They'd been together since before I'd been paying attention." He shrugged, and looked up at her finally. "That's how I know."  
  
"What happened to Marianne," Calleigh asked, cautiously.  
  
"She's fine. She got her degree in Accounting- she was 19 when she and my dad were married, hadn't gone to school. And then she left for New York and got a job there. I saw her a couple times a year, talked to her probably once a month, most of the time. I always knew she was my mother, but Melissa was my mom. I doubt most people I knew back then even know Melissa isn't my mother. Marianne was more like an aunt or a big sister than anything," he replied. "She walked out on you, though," Calleigh said.  
  
"No, she didn't, Calleigh. She didn't want to hurt me. She was scared- it was 1973, no one talked about that sort of thing back then, you know that. Better she left than she lost it with me, you know? It turned out just fine, anyway," he argued.  
  
"Parents shouldn't abandon their children," Calleigh said. "They shouldn't give up on them."  
  
"No one abandoned me. No one gave up on me. It's not like that," he said, shaking his head.  
  
"Tim, my parents are alcoholics," she said, sharply. "I know what abandonment looks like. That woman abandoned those kids. I don't think there's ever a good excuse for that. Your mother abandoned you, and she didn't have a good excuse either."  
  
He blinked. "I don't know what you want me to say to that," he said finally. "We don't know that she abandoned them yet. Hell, we don't even know whether she committed suicide yet."  
  
"Well, someone there abandoned them. Doesn't matter who, you shouldn't abandon your kids," she replied stubbornly.  
  
He took a deep breath, looking for the words to answer her, but she interrupted him before could quite begin. "No, no, I'm sorry. I'm just angry."  
  
"This shouldn't have happened, I shouldn't have lectured you," he said.  
  
"No, it's ok. You're angry too," she said, stepping forward and putting a hand on his arm.  
  
"You just all kept saying things about the house and the mother and I just didn't think it was fair," he said softly.  
  
"Maybe it's not," she conceded.  
  
"Ok, then," he said, looking back at his photographs. "I gotta work on this drawing. There's too much evidence."  
  
She nodded and withdrew. But she stopped at the doorway and looked at him for a long moment before going to find Horatio. 


End file.
